


lost & found

by pyrites



Series: hand in hand [7]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (surprise!), Ambiguous/Open Ending, Author is disabled, Bisexual Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Cane user Jon, Gen, HoH Tim, Introspection, Jon Sims Bi Pride January 2021, M/M, OCD Jon, Schizoaffective Jon, TL;DR - Jon returns to the present moment.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:42:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29890986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrites/pseuds/pyrites
Summary: There is one other thing he’d been given like this, and he can’t keep in the shoebox.vii.pride
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker
Series: hand in hand [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095512
Comments: 18
Kudos: 39
Collections: GerryTitan verse, bi jon sims celebration





	lost & found

**Author's Note:**

> final installment in my series for the [jon sims bi pride event](http://jonsimsbipride.tumblr.com/)! we made it, gang.
> 
> **CWs in the end notes!**

───── ✿ ─────

The simple, black bookmark folded into the journal has thin stripes of pink, purple and blue running up the vertical end. A gift from dadima, shyly given during one of his sporadic trips home during that last year of her life. There are others lodged in the other journals as he went back and forth between them like a codebreaker, but this is the one that he shut away in the box with her final words.

Why?

Certainly, it _could_ just be that she’d given it to him and so he wanted to keep them together. It could just be a coincidence. Except that he doesn’t think it is, not really. Not weighed against everything else here, spread across his bed like sorting seashells dug out of the sand on a beach trip. Pretty, useless things.

What makes something become useless like that? Jon doesn’t know when he started thinking like that, or whose idea it was before his. He doesn’t know when pieces of himself that made him happy once became too beautiful to be worth anything. There’s something to be said, perhaps, about a perceived ratio of worth to suffering. When it becomes too easy, doesn’t that mean it’s finished? That the problem is solved?

What a load of absolute horseshit. That’s what Georgie would say, he’s sure.

Not just Georgie, either. Probably… everyone he’s ever known and loved, even people he’s known and hated. Even people he’s loved and might hate him, now.

There is one other thing he’d been given like this, and he can’t keep in the shoebox.

He’d left his cane propped up against the wall by the closet, and he can see the sticker from here. The top left corner is lifting off and it’s been driving him up the _wall,_ but he can’t bring himself to remove it. Not only for fear of the residue it’d leave but because it’s been there for so long, because _Tim_ is the one who put it there, because the one thing that Jon _knows_ they still have in common after all of this is _that sticker_ and he didn’t think he needed to think of it that way until he looked at it just now. It winds him where he sits.

He can’t think about trapdoors. He can’t think about trapdoors, or he’ll never stop thinking about trapdoors. But he’s already fallen down so many just tonight, so why not another? Why not the one that started this?

There’s a reason this hurts so badly, and it isn’t the muscle damage. It hurts to hang onto suspicion by the teeth when he _can’t find evidence_ that it _means_ anything, and maybe he’ll kick himself for being so sentimental when it all comes rushing back tomorrow, but for now — for now, he wants to remember what it felt like to look at that sticker and think, _I have friends here._

Up in research, after a point, Jon hardly thought twice about his own patterned button-ups and chipped nail polish and the gold earring he’s felt naked without since uni. It never occurred to him that anyone might comment on it; no one here would be like him, take comfort in the sight of him, care enough to bring it up. Any ridicule he faced would be swiftly shut down — _that_ skill, he’d grown confident in over the years. That much, he was very good at. Scaring people away.

So, when Tim’s hands suddenly reached around the side of his desk to snatch his cane away, Jon’s first instinct was just to tear into him for being invasive. How _dare_ he, you can’t just _do_ that with someone’s mobility aid, some other bitter scolding that any able-bodied person should still have the common _sense_ not to need. That would have been anyone’s first instinct.

Tim didn’t even need to cut him off with _take it easy, hang on,_ before Jon stopped himself in his tracks and realized what he was actually doing. Perhaps he might have let himself continue the lecture had the sticker been something stupid, like a pineapple or an emoji with sunglasses, but it was only the bi flag. For the first time, Jon could see that Tim’s nails were painted with a rich shade of berry pink. It was rather beautiful against the warm brown of his hands.

_“…I had an extra,”_ Tim had shrugged, looking away in uncertainty. _“Pack of three. Already gave the other one away, and… yeah.”_

He’d nodded to the mug on Jon’s desk; solid black, but with thin stripes of pink, purple and blue circling the rim. From a matching set with the pen he always kept in his bag, and a bookmark left at home in his dadima’s journal. A strange gift to some people, Jon supposes, but it made sense at the time. You’re reading so you might want a cup of tea, something like that. It was sweet of her.

It never occurred to him that anyone would bother to look that closely. Close enough to see a little bit of themselves in him, and to not just clutch it close to their chest in silence but to take the plunge and _say_ it. To ask, _say it with me?_

Still, it was bold to put a sticker on his _cane,_ of _all_ things. And yet, Jon couldn’t bring himself to be cross with him for it; Tim had cut his own sticker in half and used the pieces to decorate his hearing aids. He was probably trying to say two things at once.

And he’d just tried _so_ hard to make sure it was perfectly lined up with the handle, the ends nearly touching in perfect parallel as it wrapped around, no air bubbles underneath. Certainly, he could have _asked_ first, but Jon couldn’t say his own words spoke any clearer than actions, either. If he were brave enough to have gone first, he might have done something impulsive, too.

Jon ended up lecturing him anyway. Tim took it like a champ, bashful and wincing as he was. With that out of the way, they could get on with their caseload like nothing had changed, because nothing had changed.

Though, something did change. Something changed the next time Jon had a sensory meltdown at work and Tim followed him out of the room in concern. Something that made Jon admit that he needed deep pressure even more than he needed to escape the crowded room, admit in no uncertain terms that actually, he would _very much appreciate it_ if Tim wouldn’t mind just lying on top of him for a while on the breakroom couch until his sympathetic nervous system stopped firing off thirty conflicting signals at once. It was a useful change, on days like that. An outright nice one, when he realized that he didn’t have to avoid Tim like the plague afterwards, or justify what he found comforting.

Not that Jon had ever been _so_ eager to touch and be touched that he couldn't survive without it. He could. He did, he does. But for a little while there, he didn’t have to.

Would it even be _possible_ to go and reconcile with Tim right now, even just about this? The way he didn’t need to with Luis, the way he didn’t know _how to_ for so long with Georgie, the way he finally did with dadima before she passed. Does it _need_ to be like this? Weren’t they something, once?

Jon wishes he had some encouragement. He wants it to be in the way Alma chose her words, in Mickey’s well-earned baritone, in the voice he made up for Basil in his head. All he has, though, is the memory that Tim saw himself in him once, just this one little thread. They’re so different, even more so now, but they still have something in common. Even if they’ve lost all capacity to speak on it.

Is that something that they could ever get back? After what he’s done? Is it even worth wanting back, at a time like this? What does it matter anymore?

Whoa. Oh. No, wait, he— Oh, _G-d._

The hitch it put in his plans to clean, shower, cook — that desperation for order has been in the backseat since he sat down. Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that— Isn’t that something he should want? Shouldn’t he be _thankful_ for a moment of clarity, of seeing— of registering his surroundings for what they are? Entirely self-made?

Nausea grips his stomach with tepid hands. No, no, no, pulling back is _worse,_ it’s _worse_ to see the bigger picture in fractured glimpses and losing them before they can be put together, it’s _so much worse_ than believing he has a real reason to be afraid. It’s easier to push it away until he’s pushed everyone away and created a safe space where he can only trust himself.

It only takes one moment of clarity to trace it back. The abrupt halt of his equilibrium — the moment he learned about Gertrude, and decided that in order to solve the mystery, he would need to use the parts of his mind he’d been suppressing with medication. As if _that_ impulse alone was any indication he was magically no longer schizoaffective. He remembers deciding that the irrationality in it didn’t matter because there were more important things to worry about like secret murderers and betrayal waiting to happen, and the real mistake had been trying to make friends in the first place because it’s only a betrayal if you trusted someone first. If you turn up gutted in your house it’s because you let them in and gave them their choice of kitchen knives, and you have no one to blame but your own poor judgment.

Eventually, he just retreated back into what he knew. And he’s doing it again, isn’t he? Pouring things back into this box like they’re toxic, like they’ll need to be chained up and thrown into the sea if he ever hopes to stop feeling like this.

He stops. He reaches for one of the candles, fallen over in his fervor to bounce against his hip. Straightens the wick.

He hasn’t opened this box in years, but — he’d kept it for a reason. Was this the reason? This moment, here, when it all comes back in some cinematic rush that makes him remember the value of life and love and friendship and blah, blah, blah? Is this supposed to make him better? It it supposed to make him want to be better?

The want he _does_ have is simple: he wants his friend back. Maybe that isn’t what “better” means or is or should be, but he knows _that_ is all what he wants right in this moment. And he wants to be able to want that _without_ calling it pathetic, or sad, or hopeless. Why want someone who doesn’t want you? Who could very well just be _waiting_ for that sentimental weak point, for him to let his guard down?

He takes out the trash bags he’d filled up instead and hurries them out to the curb so he can get back inside. This time, he only twists the lock nine times before stopping and considers it a relief. Onetwothree, onetwothree, onetwothree. For a moment he hovers in uncertainty between the kitchen and somewhere undecided, scrutinizing the integrity of his water filter from a distance before he makes for the case of plastic bottles he’d hidden inside a cabinet instead. He inspects the cap closely in the light before cracking it open.

So, what next _tonight._ Shower, cook, sleep. Okay, yes, that’s doable.

But what comes after that?

Wait until after to decide. Just go through the motions. Step one, step two, step three.

He goes back to his room for a change of clothes to bring into the bathroom. Jon looks at his weekly pill organizer on the bedside table and counts the unopened days. He’d gone cold turkey on a Tuesday night. If he _wanted_ to pick up again, he would have to wait until the next coming Tuesday night so as not to disturb the order of things, and they just make him so _foggy_ and — no. No, he can’t risk it. 

That’s too much work, that’s too much planning, no. He doesn’t have the luxury of setting whole weeks aside to reacclimate to the heavy restlessness, the electric insomnia, he doesn’t have the _time._ It’s too much of a risk. He needs to stay sharp and alert and ready. He needs to try something else.

On his way out of the room, he pauses. The shoebox is right where he left it, loosely shut and overfull. Didn’t it close more firmly before? He must not have put everything back exactly the same way. It’s probably the little round man’s fault, being the only soft thing in a collection of metal, paper, and wax.

Jon decides to put one of the candles on his bedside table; the one that Basil decorated, with the flowers painted like they’d grown between the bars of a cage. He considers placing the shoebox somewhere else in the room, out of the closet for once, but— something needs to stay where he feels it’s kept safe. One small piece at a time. 

Maybe he’s never been good at letting things go after all. Maybe that was never the point. Maybe one day he’ll frame his countermeasures, but not just yet.

As he sets his clothes on the bathroom counter and hangs the handle of his cane on the edge of the sink, Jon takes a moment to rub his thumb over the lifting corner of the sticker and wonders if a resin gloss might do the trick.

───── ✿ ─────

**Author's Note:**

>  **CW: might be mildly anxiety inducing; rejecting medication; paranoia; ongoing/unresolved delusion; season two-typical jon honestly; at one point, tim grabs jon's cane without asking but it's addressed in text!**
> 
> finally, finished! my goal with this last piece was to show jon's process of making progress one small step at a time, while still being candid about the severity of his mental state.
> 
> speaking of, i will be completely honest: the way this event was received at large took a serious toll on not just my mental health, but that of others, too. i think it's important i make that clear, because it goes hand in hand with why i wanted to finish this story anyway! the reception to this event just proved the point we were trying to make by running it — bi people are vulnerable, and we deserve an opportunity to tell our stories honestly and safely. our stories can be about more than just being bi, but being bi can still have a bearing on those experiences.
> 
> so, thank you to everyone who took part in creating this space with us! i can't express how much that support and solidarity means to me. 
> 
> [[jon sims bi pride tumblr](http://jonsimsbipride.tumblr.com/)] | [[my tumblr](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)] | [[ GTCU masterpost](https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/14KlgPfOb16ocGj8k0QrElw6UY0SqoNeH2yTj_zQ31bA/edit#)]


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